[1] His first success was a bust in plaster of a Sudanese man "Saïd Abdullah of the Mayac, Kingdom of the Darfur" (Sudan), exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, the same year that slavery was abolished in all French colonies.

During this time, he traveled abroad, and conceived a project to sculpt a series of ethnic types, spectacularly lifelike busts for their new ethnographic gallery.

[citation needed] In 1856, he traveled to Algeria, discovered onyx deposits in then reopened ancient quarries and began to use the stone in busts.

[4] In 2005, Barbara Larson critically discussed an exhibition at Musée d`Orsay, pointing out connections between colonial interventions and aesthetic production as well as feminist aspects.

[4] In 2022, the curators of The Colour of Anxiety, an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which shows two sculptures of Cordier (La femme africaine, 1857 and Venus africaine, 1899) have commented that " While white male sculptors such as John Bell and Charles Cordier intended to bring the pathos of the institution of slavery to public attention, yet they nonetheless traded on the allure of illicit sexuality born of that same system.